We know that Facebook integration is important for you and your apps, so we strive to make sure you can use the latest and greatest features of the Facebook SDK in your Parse-powered apps. Recently, Facebook released update 3.2 to their iOS Facebook SDK, adding support for better mobile analytics, enhanced error handling, improved dialog support, and a number of other API improvements. Today we’re excited to announce that the Parse SDK has been updated to support these powerful new features.

As part of our continued support for Facebook integration with Parse, we are changing the way that the Parse SDK works with the Facebook SDK. Instead of including a copy of the Facebook SDK within our framework, we now allow you to use the Facebook SDK downloaded directly from Facebook’s developer website in your applications. This has a number of benefits for you:

It reduces the size of the Parse iOS SDK by 32%. If you don’t use Facebook in your apps, this is pure savings for you. If you do use Facebook, you no longer have to worry about side-by-side integration of the genuine Facebook SDK and the one bundled with the Parse SDK.

Facebook SDK tutorials and samples will work, verbatim, with your code. No more PF_FB!

You can upgrade your Facebook SDK independently of your Parse SDK and vice versa as soon as bug-fixes and non-breaking changes are released.

You can include resources (e.g. images and localization) for use with the Facebook SDK without worrying about our renamed copies of the SDK.

We will be able to update our support for new versions the Facebook SDK more rapidly since we won’t have to repackage all of Facebook’s APIs.

Because of this change, in order to use the latest version of the Parse SDK, you’ll need to make a few modifications to your app:

Change your call to [PFFacebookUtils initializeWithApplicationId:] to [PFFacebookUtils initializeFacebook]. Note that you’ll need to make sure that your Facebook Application ID was set in your application’s plist file under the key FacebookAppID as described in section 5 of Facebook’s getting started guide.

Change all references to symbols with the prefix PF_FB to their standard Facebook SDK prefix, FB (e.g. PF_FBRequest becomes FBRequest).

If you were still using any of Facebook’s deprecated APIs from version 2.0 of their SDK (e.g. PF_Facebook, extendAccessToken), Parse APIs that exposed this functionality have been removed. Please see Facebook’s guide to upgrading from old versions of the Facebook SDK to learn about these changes and their replacements.

If you’d like to learn more about Parse’s integration with the Facebook SDK or are starting a new iOS app and want to support Facebook authentication, please take a look at our guide.